


Sinker

by calmlikesurrender



Series: Started but don't plan on finishing. [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, M/M, Mermaids, attempted suicide, kind of, or well louis is the only mermaid, this story is weird idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:35:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calmlikesurrender/pseuds/calmlikesurrender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis' a merman and Harry's sixteen and maybe suicidal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sinker

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many wips on word that I want to get rid of so I'm posting a bunch that I know I'll never finish, but I like too much to just toss. That's all :)

_When his dad left, it was an entire afternoon_.

\--

Harry needs the sea like his sister needs strangers’ hands. There’s something missing when you split up a family. Some wound left to fester, to rot. Even at sixteen, he knows this.

            Through the thin cabin walls, Gemma stitches it with moans.

            Harry just wants to smell like he’s bathed in salt water. That’s all.

            His parents can fight over them like they’re property- draw lines in the sand until kingdom come. He just wants to be a piece of a Pablo Neruda poem. Because just the word, sticky and bitter in the back of his throat, _divorce_ , makes him wish the posters up on the wall in his father’s study weren’t so ancient, like if there could still be magic somehow, then there could still be love.

Or he doesn’t need love, not really, just cohabitation. Anything better than waking up in the middle of the night when his mother’s working late and Gemma’s new _friend_ is making a massacre of her headboard in the next room.

 He just wants the etches to be real- the stick-thin torsos, ripples of muscle beneath tense dark flesh, the light trailing of scales just above their hips where below his bellybutton he only has the peppering of a few dark hairs. _A Merman_ in caption like the plaques at the feet of the dinosaurs in the museums he’d visited when he was a kid, _A.D. 1467_.

            He just wants to see the bottom of the ocean. Or the top of the sky. Or… _God_ , the end of a dinner without his mother sobbing silently into her potatoes. It’s been nearly six months, but he still wakes up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water only to find her curled up on the sofa alone.

            His dad hadn’t left much. His catamaran had been the first to go that afternoon, his motorboat next. The refurbished hanger they’d spent all summer fixing when he was thirteen had been the last, but the worst. Now the dock shed’s desolate and creaky. He can almost feel eyes on him in the dark when he inches across the tiny pier with steady feet. He could do this with his eyes closed honestly, he’s made the trip so many times, but this is different.

            He’s alone. Lugging a thin pack with a few things- a blanket, a little food, his favorite Robert Frost, a Swiss army knife, his old fishing pole. It was too small for him now really, but the perfect size for the tiny boat he had left after his dad was done harvesting organs. They’d named it together when he was nearly ten. He’d been up on his father’s shoulders, he remembers, watching it bob gently on the slow waves off the Chesapeake Bay by their secluded cottage.

            “Whad’ya think?” his dad’s voice. Poseidon.

            “Sinker,” he’d urged excitedly.

            His dad’s voice again, his _laugh_.. He hadn’t heard it in so long.

            Just there in fading paint sprawled out across the edge- S.S. Sinker.

            He’s not even sure where he’s going.

            Or if he’s going anywhere at all.

            Maybe he’ll just sleep out in the boat for a few days, wait until Gemma and his mother start to worry. Or maybe he’ll cast her out into the open sea. Make the Atlantic Ocean the sharp metallic burn of a bullet, the slow careful kiss of a handful of pills.

\--

            The first few days are the same sea he’s known his entire life. It rocks him gently while the sun’s up, laps at the shallow sides of his tiny boat, nudging close to the edge as if it’s trying to see what he’s brought along. _A sacrifice_ he says out loud without thinking _to Poseidon_. But when he looks around at his meager fill, he can’t decide if he meant the items or himself so he quickly pushes the thought aside.

            At night, the sea is the most beautiful thing he’s ever known. Where the sun bears down on it all afternoon, the moon sinks into its waves, makes crystals in the shadows, nudges at the creatures that approach his boat curiously. Their eyes shine like silver and he falls asleep with his head rested on his arm, watching the stars like the torn bits out of an old black and blue blanket, headed for wherever there’s a nice breeze and a slow current.

            He remembers how his father used to walk him to the edge of their boats and, holding his hand tightly, toss a dozen coins over the edge.

            When Harry’d asked him why, he always said that there were merpeople down deep below the surface who guarded the water and the honest man’s voyages. It was their duty, but a just sailor offered payment all the same.

            All alone, Harry seems farther from the story than he ever has. Back then it was all this majestic wilderness. If he could dive a thousand miles, if he could hold his breath for an eternity. _If. If. If_.

            Now he holds on tightly to his fishing pole with one hand, his book propped up beneath his head with the other. They’re the only things valuable he owns now, and he’d rather bash them against the side of the boat until they’re splintering to pieces than offer them down to nameless beings living silently beneath the surface.

\--

            He’s nibbling on the some of the last of his food, bits of jerky, when the wind seems to disappear. It’s not even calm, it’s just not there at all.

            He sits up, rocking the boat with his jerky movements, staring up at the sky, far off with his hand over his eyes watching the dark patch of grey he can barely make out on the squeaky-blue horizon.

            He can’t tell from so far away, but it’s immediately unsettling. A storm. The thought nearly paralyzes him.

            Then he remembers how sure he’d been loading his tiny boat up, wading through the water to push her off. The warm morning sea air lapping at his neck and arms. It suddenly feels okay sort of. Or like divine intervention.

            Okay, no, maybe a sign? An easy out.

            He settles back in again, digging through what little food he has left until he finds the canteen he’d filled with black coffee. There’s nothing more than a swallow left, but he finishes it. Then the jerky. Then the crackers and hard candies he’d swiped from the little tin Gemma keeps in her top dresser drawer.

            By the time night comes, the storm’s still only a smudge of grey in the sky, but it’s closer.

            He opens the book and reads by what little light the sun gives while it’s setting, falls asleep with it sprawled across his chest.

            Wakes up when the rain’s battering away at him like gun fire.

            He jolts to sit up, scrambling to make sense of up, of down, the boat surpassing rocking and slipping right into succumbing to the waves. These massive walls of water that have him on his side again and again, nearly flipping the boat clear over a few times.

            The rain is coursing down around him, so hard and fast he can barely keep his eyes open, muddling through shin deep water now, in a daze. He tries to

            And he’s going to drown.

            He can barely stand, stumbling until he finally gives him, dropping to his hands and knees, seeing the waves spilling steady right over the side of the boat.

            It doesn’t even feel final, the acceptance. It’s like it’s been waiting for him.

            He-

\--

            He’s spluttering, jerking up to hack out lungfulls of warm salt water.

            He breathes in so deep, pounds of air like a whirlwind. So deep his vision goes spotty, and he’s choking again, staring up into a face haloed by whatever fuzzy buzz is gripping him, trying to drag him down again. Shivering, he thinks it’s an angel maybe.

            Until he looks past his eyes to the wide blue fin snapping up to slap down on the sand again, scatter water in its wake.

            How his scales are the same color as his eyes. The same blue as the ocean at twilight. And when the waves scrape away at the sand- from cream to milky white sea foam to a deep brown like chocolate, it’s his skin from the curve of his back, the notches of his spine, to the slick slits beneath his jaw. How they taste the air above the surface, flexing slowly, soft sucking sounds.

            Everything’s the sea, every ounce of him. And Harry’s never had so much as the semblance of a kiss before _this_ \- ragged breaths, taking in greedy gulps, the merman’s lips pressed to his, offering him air like treasure- but he thinks if he ever makes it back, he’d like to taste someone else’s lips. If only to see if they taste like stars, too. Or if it’s a weird mix of nearly dying and the saltwater flooding his lungs that makes him never want to pull away.

            He feels something hard and cold pressing into his side and his vision starts to blur, his breath evening out to fast and heavy and he lets it drag him down. Whatever it is. Sleep, maybe. Death. He closes his eyes, surrenders to it.

\--

            When he wakes up, he’s groggy and disoriented. The sun glaring down at him, his skin feeling thick and hot like it’s burning straight down to the muscle. It takes him a while to realize that the ground isn’t moving. Then longer to remember why that’s strange.

            _The boat_ , he thinks breathlessly, sitting straight up, staring out at the sand past his feet to the water’s edge skirting the shore.

            It comes back to him quickly then. The boat rocking violently, tossing his things out into the vicious waves. The bitter chill of the water. The sound of wood shattering beneath him.

            Then… hands. Right?

            Rough hands on his arms, then his legs. Hands everywhere, dragging him down then away, out to sea, steady like an anchor. He’d gotten a glimpse of something metallic curled up, then stretched out. Like a fin.

            He gasps then, clambering away when he looks to his right, to the man lying down in the sand right beside him, resting his head patiently in his palms, studying Harry with a look that’s eerily close to amusement.

            “Oh god, that’s- holy fuck,” Harry manages eloquently, his voice grating at his raw throat. Staring down at the man’s hips where the smooth skin of his back turns rough and dark blue, spilling over into odd-sized scales. _A fin_ , Harry thinks, feeling his brain turning to mush, staring wide-eyed at the spread end, the almost transparent panels just in the middle.

            It’s nothing like the diagrams he’s seen. Nothing like the sketched out images he’d leafed through in his father’s study, read about in school.

            He manages a few more stilted interjections before wobbling up on unsteady legs, and noticing for the first time that he’s bare ass naked.

            He gets out a few more before he falls back to the sand, leaning to his left, and vomiting up what feels like everything he’s eaten over the past two weeks.

            He too spent to even flinch away when a pair of rough hands are patting his back.

            “It’s okay,” he hears the merman say, his voice so high it’s almost feminine.

            Once it seems Harry’s beyond the gagging phase, he flops back down in the sand, too tired to even attempt to cover his naked frame.

            Those blue eyes are eating away at him.

            “You are Sinker?”

            “Uh, no. Harry?” he says, blinking back at him.

            The merman smiles, showing two wide rows of jagged sharp teeth.

           “I’m Louis,” he chirps, delighted, leaning in to kiss Harry quickly on the mouth. Before he can pull away, Louis’ shoving him down onto his back.

            “Rest,” he orders him, stuffing a finger into his chest.

            Harry hisses, rubbing smartly at the spot, but Louis only does a wobbly squirming thing, turning around to make his way back to the water.

            By the time he’s been gone for nearly fifteen minutes, Harry’s convinced himself that he’d dreamed the entire thing. That he’d cracked his skull on a rock or something, and was daydreaming about merpeople.

            But then Louis’ coming back, rising up out of the water to shimmy over to Harry again, this time with a large coconut shell in one hand.

            “Here,” he says, holding it out to him. He taps a bit at the top half before it knocks away, something sloshing around in the bottom bit.

            When Harry takes it, Louis’ mouth quirks up in a proud smile. He stares at him until he takes a tiny sip.

            It’s not cold really, just not hot either. It’s like drinking tepid chicken stock. But milky white and slightly sweet. There are chunks of things floating around in it. Some that Harry can tell are pieces of slimy seaweed or brittle chunks of salt. Others are spongy and wriggle around in his mouth and he tries to swallow them down as fast as he can.

            Louis watches him patiently until he’s nearly done with the sloshy “soup”.

He’d decided to call it that in hopes of deterring himself from considering what it might actually be.

            When a splintered fish bone gets stuck between his teeth, he nudges it out with his thumbnail and plucks it across the sand. A narrow wedge of white with a slim chunk of flesh attached.

          “You eat fish?” he asks stupidly. It seems sort of barbaric, in a way. Having a fin sort of made you a fish, right? In all of the lessons it had been widely speculated that they lived on hardly anything. The occasional tuft of sea weed or kelp.

            Louis’d plopped down and started to cover his fin with sand when Harry’d begun drinking. His fin is halfway buried now. He stops wiggling long enough to look back at Harry with a mouth full of sharp teeth.

            “You eat cows, don’t you? Pigs?”

            “Yeah, but that’s different.”

            Louis stares down at him, from his shoulders to the pudgy flap of his belly. Down down down lower and lower so slowly, his hips, his thin thighs, knees. He settles for a bit on his feet, seems to want to touch, but he must decide against it at the last minute.

Suddenly Harry’s clothes feel so far away, even just off on a rock beyond the shore. He’s highly conscious of every part of himself.

“Ease up?” Louis offers and Harry does his best to seem unphased. He tries to remember that this is basically a clinical assessment- he’d stared at Louis’ fin after all.

Still his cheeks heat up when he gets to his knees and the merman glances behind him quickly.

            Louis nods finally, curt and serious.

            “Oh,” he says, “Right. Of course. The tail, I forgot.”

            Before Harry can blush his way through a response, Louis points to the nearly-finished soup.

            “Eat,” he says. Or demands, really. It’s clear he’s not used to being questioned.

            “How do you know so much about people?” Harry asks, “About land?” He certainly hadn’t expected him to know what cows and pigs are.

            Louis gives him a good glare and looks down at the bowl.

            Harry sips a little, but finds his appetite’s all but gone. All he can do is stare down at his own legs and just beside them where Louis’ nearly half-buried in the sand while he talks- “We have books, of course. And teachers” like Harry would surely know this. Even with the sand spread out around him, Louis’ scales still seem to almost _burn_ blue. Swirling with opalescent shades of jade and lavender and even onyx on some bits.

            Harry half expects him to shimmy out of them like a skirt, to have legs just beneath. It seems too surreal to be here beside him when his whole life he’d been stories from his father’s lips and posters in his study, books from the library and history lessons with staunchly teachers in stuffy classrooms- “The last merman was seen in the late eighteenth century by renowned dis-”. But Louis isn’t what he’d expected at all.

            He’s young, for one. When Harry asks him how old he is, Louis’s brows knit together. Once he can finally explain the role of birthdays, Louis nods slowly and says tentatively that he was the first born of his father’s children, that he’s seen eight ships sink. He adds that his scales aren’t solid yet, that he has seasons until he’ll be fully grown. Harry’s not sure how that gauges in human terms, so he settles for early twenties, and Louis beams back at him though he doesn’t understand at all, happily mumbling _twenty_ under his breath like he’s trying to work out how it fits in his throat.

            By the time Harry’s done with the soup, Louis’ tail is completely covered with sand and he’s working diligently at his hips and stomach, pouring it out between his slim fingers then patting it down onto his skin, the paper-thin scales peppering his abs.

            He sets the bowl down on the sand beside him before wondering over to his clothes. He pats them and they’re still a bit damp, but dry enough so he shrugs them on. Only his boxers and undershirt, leaving the others spread out on the splintered remains of the S.S. Sinker’s mast. Even though they’re stiff, he feels better without the cool air breezing past his bare skin.

            “This is so great,” Louis’ mumbling happily, this beaming smile plastered across his face, “Look at it. It’s so nice and cool. Harry?”

            He clears his throat, sinking down to his knees when Louis reaches out for him.

            “Here, take some,” he coos, shoveling handfuls of sand into Harry’s outstretched palms.

            “Uh, okay.”

            He’s got sand spilling over onto his wrists and legs by the time Louis seems content with his work.

            “It’s so cold, isn’t it?” he breathes out quickly, patting it down more around his scales.

            “The sand?” Harry asks, not sure if it’d be rude to drop his pile back down on the beach. He has a sickening thought that Louis expects him to eat it, but quickly pushes it aside.

            “Sand?”

            Harry’s brows screw up, “Yeah. Or like, I don’t know what you call it? _Earth_ , or something? This,” he tries, lifting his hands a little in Louis’ direction.

            He smiles at him, saying something in a language Harry doesn’t understand. It’s rough like the little German he’d heard before, but smooth, too. Like Louis was singing to him. It makes him remember going to see Niagara falls with his family when he was younger. The sound of all of that water claiming everything around it. That was the same as Louis’ voice, a waterfall with buffers. Or the tiny trickle of water it became somewhere at the end of a river, a stream so slim he could walk right over it and not even notice. 

            When Louis asks him what he was doing out all alone on such a little boat, Harry just shrugs.

            “I feel safer at sea.”

            Louis’ brows scrunch up then, “But you can’t swim.”

            And whatever, Harry’s not about to get counseled by a mythical creature. He snorts, “I can swim just fine.”

            “But you were sinking.”

            “It’s a lot of water.”

            “You weren’t trying very hard.”

            It takes an uncomfortably long time to finally convince Louis that he had been so shocked by the storm that he forgot how to swim. To which Louis promises quickly to teach him more effective swimming methods the next morning as soon as the sun comes up and Harry groans, too tired to object.

            He curls up right there on the sand, wondering if his mother and sister have stopped looking for him by now. Or if they had ever tried.

            A part of him wishes they keep looking forever. He’d stay here for a while until he’s strong enough to end it quick and clean.

           He’s just about decided when he can feel Louis’ hand at his side, cold and bumpy. Ridged almost like his scales.

            “Are you sad?” Louis asks him, petting his arm over and over until Harry groans and turns to face him.

            “No,” he says quickly, then, “Maybe. I don’t know. Why?”

            “You seem sad. And you’re alone,” he says.

            Harry wants disagree, but he can’t exactly. Not when he doesn’t even know where his home is, let alone if he’ll ever make it back.

            “You’re alone, too,” he settles for instead, expecting to goad him on. Instead, he only watches him with more pity.

            Harry hates the look so much he practically barks out the question that’s been bugging him since he saw Louis the first time and was over the initial shock of.. well, merman.

            “How do you get a tan under the ocean?”

            Louis stares back at him, “I don’t understand. A.. tan?”

            “Uh, like darker?” Harry tries, pointing up to the sky, then to Louis’ chest.

            Louis smiles then, so brightly Harry can’t help but smile, too.

            “The sun touches everything,” he tells him, reaching out to run his hand down Harry’s leg, “Even when you don’t see her, she’s leaving her mark. She kissed you here, see?”

            He touches near Harry’s knee at the mole there.

            “That’s just a blemish,” Harry tells him.

            Louis shakes his head, tsks at him, almost stern, “She’s every place, Harry. She was watching you out at sea. Who do you think led me to you?”

            “Chance,” Harry grumbles, “Luck? Your merman senses tingling?”

            But that night, before he falls asleep with Louis’ head on his chest, he says an awkward prayer to the sun. Not even sure what to call her, so opting for _Your Highness_ at the end. Mostly, it’s a lot of thank yous for him meeting Louis and then one request- just to make sure his family’s alright. _Even my dad,_ he adds, feeling absolutely ridiculous.

            He tries to make one of Louis’ merman sounds at the end, but can’t quite get it right, so settles for amen instead. 


End file.
